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CORRECTED VERSION OUTER SUBURBAN/INTERFACE SERVICES AND DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE Inquiry into growing the suburbs — infrastructure and business development in outer suburban Melbourne Broadmeadows — 6 March 2012 Members Ms J. Graley Ms L. McLeish Ms N. Hutchins Mr C. Ondarchie Mrs J. Kronberg Chair: Mrs J. Kronberg Deputy Chair: Ms J. Graley Staff Executive Officer: Mr N. Bunt Research Officer: Ms C. Frew Witnesses Mr D. Isola, chief executive officer, Mr K. Walsh, director city sustainability, Mr M. Sharp, manager strategic planning, and Mr G. Osborne, manager economic development, Hume City Council. 53 The CHAIR — There are some formalities we need to go through. First and foremost, this inquiry is an extension of the Victorian Parliament, so it is very important that we recognise that there are practices and procedures and an essential decorum that needs to be maintained. Any commentary from the public gallery, whether or not that commentary was included or considered in any way, would be subject to the deliberations of the committee, and the hearing would be suspended while those operations were under way. For those who are actually providing input today, there are acts of Parliament that provide parliamentary privilege to people who provide information to us. That is only while this hearing is actually configured in this setting, on this day and in this time. Any comments pertaining to any other information that are expressed outside the domain of this committee and its hearing would not be extended that parliamentary privilege. The material and the input is being recorded by the Hansard service of Parliament. A hard copy of transcript is available in approximately two weeks, and you will have the opportunity to look at either spelling mistakes or typographical errors but not the syntax and structural elements of your input. Having gone through all of those formalities, I also acknowledge the local member, Frank McGuire, who has joined us today. Whilst the committee has these formal processes as a preamble, we are very much looking forward to hearing from the senior team, led no doubt by the chief executive officer of the Hume City Council. We are very much looking forward to this being a day of great open dialogue. We are here to learn and are very interested to hear the particular presentation that we understand you are going to make. We will look toward that with great interest. Before anything else, I want to say that we are always very pleased when a municipality extends hospitality and allows us to operate in such delightful and professional circumstances. It is made easy for everybody to access, and I am sure to operate in, so thank you very much for your consideration and your hospitality that has been extended to us today. I am going to invite Domenic Isola, as the chief executive officer of the Hume City Council, to make his opening remarks. We are looking forward to that. Mr ISOLA — Thank you, Chair. Welcome, everyone on the committee, to Hume City Council and indeed our council chamber here at Broadmeadows. I also welcome our local MPs, Liz Beattie and Frank McGuire. Thank you for joining us. I have staff here also who will probably assist me throughout the process in describing some of the things that we want to get across today. Kelvin Walsh is our director city sustainability and looks after planning and sustainability, economic development and all things strategic at council. George Osborne is the manager economic development, and last night presented a paper to council about an economic development strategy and an investment attraction framework. We also have Michael Sharp here, who is the manager strategic planning. No doubt at some point all three of them will assist me with what we want to get across as our message. Primarily our message is that as growth continues, and we are a big player in the growth of outer suburban Melbourne, how do we make things better for the communities that are going there? We will also look at some of the things that we have probably failed communities with in the past. How are we able to ensure that those things do not occur again? It is interesting that we are meeting today at the global learning centre in Broadmeadows. This facility was built in 2002-03. It was built 40 to 50 years after the community started to come and live here in Broadmeadows. The first public library in Broadmeadows was built some 40 to 50 years post people actually coming to live here. That is just an example of where I think, over time, we have failed certain communities by not providing the right level of infrastructure. By ‘infrastructure’ we do not just refer to the hard infrastructure, like roads and transport, but also the other things that need to happen — the services, the learning and the jobs. Our presentation today is focused around making sure that those learnings are actually dealt with and that we do things a bit differently in new and growing areas of Melbourne and certainly in the city of Hume. What I will talk to is what or who Hume is and what we represent. We will look at the connection and the relationship between the suburbs that are growing out in Craigieburn and Sunbury and how they have a relationship to things that already exist in Hume and those things around them, how we make the best use of the land, how we engage our communities and how we will make sure they have a real say in what is happening and how it happens. Then we will look at the infrastructure we believe needs to be provided — the hard infrastructure, the service infrastructure and, just as importantly, the jobs that need to be created as communities go out to those areas. 54 I will start by just talking a bit about Hume. We cover 504 square kilometres, and 170 000-odd residents reside in Hume at the moment. Our growth rate is about 2.5 per cent. When you think about that, that is about a bit over 4000 people coming in to make Hume their place of residence. We expect that to grow to beyond 3 and 4 per cent over the next few years, and we will explain why we think that is going to happen. There is great diversity in our community — diversity at all levels, not just in religion, background and language but in income structure and disadvantage. We also have a council that within its municipality has a central activities area, and this is where it is — Broadmeadows. It was and is expected to become the capital of the north. We already have growth in Sunbury and Craigieburn, and the Growth Areas Authority is working through precinct structure plans and the release of up to 20 000 new lots in Lockerbie and Merrifield. To put that into context — we can call them lots, we can call them dwellings, we can call them whatever — effectively that 20 000 is about another 50 000 to 60 000 people who will come into this municipality. They will come into the municipality predominantly over in Craigieburn out to our north and into Sunbury. The Lockerbie and Merrifield developments are all in the north. A community already exists out there in Craigieburn. That will just double with the development of Lockerbie and Merrifield. As I said, there are 20 000 household lots to be developed out there. I think this afternoon, Michael, there is a tour of those sites. What you will see is paddocks. They are big, open spaces of land that are held in ownership of one or two main developers and will be the next tranche of development. The developers we have spoken to are thinking that they will start to release some of those things in the next part of next year — so in 2012–13. When you go out there today and see it at the moment, there is really not much that exists out there. Our basis is that if we are going to see 40 000, 50 000 or 60 000 people move out there, what do we need to make happen before they get out there, and what do we need to make happen as they get out there? We are fortunate, I think, in terms of a number of things actually existing in Hume that will make that a bit easier, with the great industry that already operates in Hume — the airport, CSL, Ford, Nestlé and Honda, and we also have all the major land developers that are out here in Hume and looking, obviously, to develop and build residential allotments to service the new communities that are coming up. In doing that, the first thing we wanted to touch on was that as those communities are planned for and as residents come out there, what are the existing communities and what relationship is needed between those existing communities and the new communities? I will use three main examples, and others can jump in if they want. The Broadmeadows central activities area — so where we sit at the moment — the capital of the north, is meant to have the provision of high-quality business and commercial enterprise sitting in this location. Fortunately we own most of the land in this area, so where we sit at the moment — this whole block — we own. There is a real need in this location to build the types of services that the communities around here and new communities that will grow in our north and around us will need to have as part of their service delivery.

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